Welcome to the virtual archive of the minor works of the fifteenth-century poet, John
Lydgate.

The goals of this archive are twofold: first, it is an attempt to make the
manuscripts and other media containing the works of Lydgate that exist in less than
twenty witnesses more accessible to scholars of the poet, students who may have only
read them in print editions, and individuals interested in manuscripts as artifacts
in their own right. To this end, it is intended to provide not a critical edition of
these poems, but to accurately transcribe and record the variations in the witnesses
– changes in the language, omissions, and insertions – that are obscured sometimes
by the traditional editorial process.

Second, this archive is meant to bridge a gap between the digital world, where
anything that cannot be concretely categorized is often left by the wayside, and the
physical object with its rich set of significations. Rather than the standard
structure of a TEI document, an alternative TEI schema privileging the
manuscript page as an object and its appearance has been used throughout. Additionally, where
necessary other metadata standards have been incorporated into the description as
well. In this way, the hope is that the physical object is described and displayed
in a way that preserves the connections made by the physical object itself while
also holding to common and accepted metadata standards.